It seems SmartList doesn't like lists with '+' in their names - createlist complains that
createlist: This listname contains magic characters createlist: Support for this is planned, ask on the SmartList createlist: mailinglist for more details
So, what's the problem in using +-sign in a listname? What happens if I simply edit createlist to accept them - what will break?
Why would I want to do that? I'll explain:
I need to set up an automated list creation mechanism: an application server will create lists and manage their contents, yet it should not run a mailserver by itself.
The application should not have root access to the mailserver either, it should work so that the mailserver grabs the addresses from the application server and creates or updates the lists accordingly - and even this should preferably be done without root privileges. (I would also keep such lists separate from regular lists, but that's no big deal, just create another userid & directory and recompile flist.)
So, I'd need to create and remove lists without altering sendmail alias database every time.
I can get around this by naming the lists as "application+list@my.domain" and using virtusertable to convert "list@application.my.domain" into that, but then I'd have to hack Smartlist to understand multiple lists under a single alias. How difficult would that be?
That is, I'd have just something like
application : "| /something/flist application" application-request : "| /something/flist application-request"
in the alias file and then somehow have messages directed to the appropriate list depending on the +-suffix in the address.
Now it seems (although I must admit multigram source is a bit hard to read in places) flist cannot handle that by itself.
First I thought I'd simply write a procmail script that'd pick the plus sign and pipe the message to "flist application+list", having each list simply named with + sign in it, but trying to create such a list manually failed with the above message.
Are there other reasons why the approach outline above would not work? (Any better ideas?)